Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

We were down in Maryland with the whole fambo watching Jack's very first college soccer game and I tee'ed up this conversation topic at dinner. After one sentence, someone interrupted and began talking over me, which can only mean one thing: This topic is perfect for a blog post. I originally happened upon this whole matter while reading Reddit. I've been reading a lot of the Reddit. I'm not proud. But someone said something about something or other "In West Village."  And yes, Reddit hashtag NYC lost its mind.  Because it's "In THE West Village." West Village is always preceded by a THE. Just like THE Bronx. Now all the other boroughs do *not* start with a "the." For example, it's: Manhattan. Queens. Brooklyn. Staten Island. THE Bronx. Now. If we're talking about the 'hoods.... I'd say "I'm going to Soho" (no "the"). I'd also say I'm going to NoMad, Chelsea, Turtle Bay, FlatIron,  Hells K...

  photocredit: otherwing photography We were upstate during a major flooding incident and all these crayfish were barreling across roads. "Why did the crayfish cross the road?" No freaking idea, by all accounts it seemed like a really dumbass idea.  We were upstate for the annual familypalooza week in an AirB&B and of course we picked the week it rained apocalyptically. Between the storms, we walked up and down the country roads near our place. We observed flooded out roadways, swamped bridges and pretty much just lakes on either side of the streets. We made comments on the depth, salt content, and likely water recession timelines like we had at least a clue what we were talking about. Which we did not, of course. We ran into this one woman, a volunteer firefighter who had been called to this ramshackle house up the street to pump out water in the basement that had risen higher than the first floor. She came out of the house and apparently saw a crayfish on the road, so s...

  Headed out into the tundra to go to the Frick Museum As per my last post, it was cold AF in New York City. I decided this might be a rare occasion to break out my grandmother's "knee length" blond mink coat. *For anyone stymied right now, let it be known that while my grandmother had an aggressively large personality, she was really really short. But yeah it's still a gorgeous coat that was made by my great grandfather for his daughter... my great grandfather being a furrier and all. My plan was to wear this coat so as not to freeze my ass off on the way up to the Frick, the perfect gilded age destination for a person in such a coat. So on brand.  I get up there, I meet my friend Anna and together we go inside. And here's how I know the Frick reads this blog, specifically the earlier post here , where i rant specifically about four things at the newly remodeled Frick: 1) Somehow, you keep winding up in the Frick lobby and then you have to dig out your tickets ag...

 So we had 14 for Thanksgiving dinner. We started doing the holidays at our place after that one year, early on, when we found ourselves in the car at 1am on Christmas Eve.This transpired because Tom's parents are divorced and apparently whoever Tom spends more time with on Christmas Eve is the one he loves the most. So yeah. And this was after a bunch of Thanksgiving drama. So as we were driving through the wintery darkness so many moons ago, I said to Tom, It's your fault they got divorced, why am I suffering? (I didn't actually say that line, it's part of a Nate Bargatze comedy special , but I expressed a similar point. It just took me probably about an hour.) Anyway, ever since then, we hunker down at home and tell anyone who wants to see us they need to come by us. That's it. And you know, I think it's lovely. I hope everyone else does too. 20 years later, I'm thankful for them making the trek. Happy Thanksgiving!

  My grandpa, age 2 My mother texted over this photo the other day, apropos nothing. I guess she was cleaning out boxes. I had never seen this shot before. Meanwhile, I have this one in a frame: Grandpa was very athletic. Played football in college. Some things you don't realize until you're old enough to realize such things, but he grew up fatherless. His dad died very young, so he was raised by his single mother. At some point this historical point of interest turned into an a ha moment for me. Here was a guy that as a child experienced the death of his father, the family breadwinner.  As an adult, I can think back and see the trauma kind of buried in his persona. Don't get me wrong, he was beloved; but he also had a hard edge honed sharp probably as a survival mechanism. He grew up too soon, lived through the Great Depression, fought in WW2. He made a life for himself really against a lot of odds.

 Not just a baby goat, this goat was 4 hours old. Literally this goat had been in utero until like just after lunch.  Mom and the goat. We were vacationing in Ocean City Maryland when this photo was taken. These people renting an airBnB down the block from us said they had to take the goat with them on vacation due to it being born while they were packing up the car to leave.  I don't fully understand this. We failed to ask sufficient questions. For example, no one asked where the Mom Goat was and why she was deemed incompetent.  Hopefully mom goat was home in the barn getting some much needed R&R, and this was not a scenario where the people down the block had just made off with a goat infant, 911 style. I bet AirBnB rules don't specifically forbid goats, so at least as far as AirBnB is concerned I'm sure these people down the block are in the clear. 

  Breakfast from room service at the  Ritz Carlton in Philly After Davie's funeral, it was weird to realize no one we know still lives in my hometown. My parents moved to a nearby retirement community, but they were traveling and their apartment is pretty far out of the way. It felt completely suboptimal to drive the whole way over there and figure out all the logistics just to stay in an empty place. Also, it's like a three hour drive from the city and thus super taxing to go back and forth in one day. So we decided to see if there might be a nice place to stay in the vicinity. Call it a mini-vacation. Turns out, there's nowhere nice to stay on or about my hometown. We wound up in Philadelphia. At the Ritz Carlton because why not.  It's a pretty building and the restaurant was surprisingly good. View from the room: Does this room overlook the street? Oh why yes it does. Thank you motorcycles at the crack of dawn. Tom and I decide that our main endeavor is going to be t...

My pop, a former elementary school principal, had a longstanding tradition of not giving out candy for Halloween. Yup, he was that guy.  One year he gave pencils to the trick-or-treaters. He never did that again.  Pop pivoted to what might be considered a truce— he started handing out plastic spiders. He bought the spiders from Oriental Trader in packs of one million. Growing up you could never celebrate a holiday or birthday without a few dozen spiders showing up as a gift, a decorative element on a gift, a cute napkin ornament, centerpiece detail, chandelier dangle, or if you looked closely at the Christmas tree you could probably find forty spiders tucked in the boughs.  So when I first took this plastic pumpkin out of the basement to fill it up with candy and saw this: I spy something inside this pumpkin. My first instinct was to just leave it in there and maybe give it to a kid who looked like he/she might have a preference for a plastic spider. But then I switched u...

Was talking to Mom & Dad the other day and Pop starts talking about how, one time long ago, they were in Ireland. Pop chatted up a farmer and asked the guy to teach him something in Irish. The farmer said, well you should learn   Póg mo thóin which means "Kiss my Ass." And sure, you could see how that would come in handy. Fast forward and it's raining. So Mom & Dad go to a pub to dry off. Pop sits down at the bar and tells the bartender he's learned a couple words in Irish. The bartender is game. He says, what'd you learn? Pop says, " Póg mo thóin" The bartender says, "oh yes, that means Thank you."

A long long time ago, in 2013 to be exact, Tom and I babysat my 6-yo twin nephew and niece for an entire day. I wrote about it here:  https://waitingtogetthere.blogspot.com/2013/06/uncle-tom-and-aunt-stacey-best.html One of our activities that day was to rehearse a skit and then perform it for my brother and Mary when they returned home. Our inspiration was a dramatic rendition of this scene: It's from the movie Rushmore. The kids have, apparently, no recollection of their theatrical debut but I remember laughing so hard I could barely say my lines. "I like your nurses uniform, guy." Today is a big day because we are hosting a Rushmore watch party. Tom will make spaghetti and meatballs, we'll have popcorn and left over halloween candy. We'll all watch the movie and then. If all goes according to my nefarious plan, we'll perform an encore version of the skit in question. Call it a 12 year anniversary redux.  I'll let you know how it goes.

  Davie at the beach with my grandparents, circa 1982 Yesterday we attended the funeral of my childhood next door neighbor, Davie. Davie and his wife Sandy had three girls who were roughly the same ages as my brother and me and lived across the street from my parents for 50+ years. And when I say next door neighbor, I mean the kind of neighbor we didn't knock on their door, we just slammed right in their house and made ourselves a sandwich. (Which would have been white bread, butter on one slice, mayo on the other slice, Lebanon Balogna with a dab of yellow mustard and a handful of potato chips jammed in there. But this is beside the point). With the perspective of hindsight, Davie was a skinny chain-smoking functioning alcoholic with anger management issues. He also was always up to something you desperately wanted to be a part of. One halloween he dressed up like Fig Newton and all I remember is his skinny legs in these bright green tights sticking out of a gigantic green fig cos...

 So yeah, let's start here:  With some frequency, my mother would ask, did you see my email?  And I would say, nope, I did not.  And my mother would look down her nose and roll her eyes. Oh you young people with all your texting who don't know how the email works. She was so impatient.  For my part, idk, being not actually a young person but a Gen X'er extremely familiar with how the email works, I have managed to collect probably five email addresses over the years. So I just assumed the missing email went to one of my defunct yahoo accounts or something. Besides, Tom always was cc:ed so if it was anything important, he had the deets. If you're quick like this, you might be able to see where this is heading, but let me give you a couple other clues.  My father sent out in quick succession, the following two emails: This email came through without any explanation from my father. Just a big photo. That's my parents heads btw. Pop's into the photographic arts...

We drove up to Garnet Hill Lodge Friday night and woke up to this view:  View from our room at Garnet Hill Lodge Of course I immediately connected the dots to Casper David Friedrich . I know, I'm quick like this: Right?! Striking similarities except i was not wearing a green velvet traveling suit. Or standing upon a rock. We used to go skiing *a lot.* Like every weekend. For years. So lately, at the beginning of every trip when it's been maybe a year since the last time I had skis on my feet... I have this moment where my head is, LETS DO IT! And my body is thinking, hmmm, it's been awhile.... maybe be sensible about this, old lady. Thus, there's decisions that are surprisingly difficult: hmmm, which way to go? I remember being up at Garnet Hill with my brother and Tom years ago and going up and down Skull Buster. Up and down, over and over. Hooting and giggling and let me tell you why: Until this trip, I woulda swore Skull Buster was called "Skull Crusher." I...

  Five soccer balls, one wayward basketball and lots of electrolyte beverage plastic floating in the Hudson River. There's an entire pier covered in astroturf. Kids, crowds of them in soccer uniforms, are always headed in that direction. So I can kinda see how all these soccer balls got in the water: Little kids are not much for ball control, and they're playing on fields literally in the middle of a river.  Or an estuary.    I think it is the Hudson Estuary.  I need to get this right, otherwise I will upset my father. One must not be inaccurate about geographical features such as this. An estuary is a river that flows both ways. Such as the Hudson.  Look at me, knowing things. Now let's discus the basketball. There's two basketball courts nearby, but not on a pier. They are on the other side of a little bit of grass, the walking path and the bike path, ie, kinda far from the water and yeah. What kind of wild ass shot gets your basketball into the drink for...

  It's a 22 min walk from the 33rd Street PATH stop to the Consulate General of Brazil Mark and my nephew are going to the Brazilian Consulate tomorrow to take care of some business and I helped them figure out how to get there on the train.   This reminded me of the time I too, went to the Brazilian Consulate to take care of some business. It all started when my cousin, who was really young at the time, maybe she was a freshman in college, pulled an extremely "freshman in college" move. She mailed her passport to the Brazilian Consulate in New York City. She was trying to get a Visa to be an exchange student over the summer or something, I can't remember. This was a big mistake on about three levels. First of all, my cousin lives in Virginia, therefore outside the NY Metro area which is served by the Consulate General of NY. Also, you have to get a Visa at an embassy, not a consulate, turns out. Lastly, if you mail your passport to the Brazilian Consulate, they won...

It's really pretty :-)   I may have just realized I am a repository for the plants of people no longer with us, between my grandma's cactuses and Tom's mom's partner's brother's jade plants . My grandma also had a whole bunch of dumb canes.  spoiler alert: dumb cane usually don't look this nice. They have a penchant to grow one big leaf on a long stem. We were over at Jamie and Scott's in Brooklyn on Saturday night and Jamie had a dumb cane in a cute pot on the coffee table. I said, "is that a dumb cane?" and she looked at me like I had insulted her plant. It's not a great name, tbh so I get it. Luckily I have the Picture This plant identifier app on my phone (that I got for my fern life list ) and was shown to be correct: Jamie's plant did in fact identify as a dumb cane. I handed her my phone and she was suitably impressed because yeah. It was impressive.  But it was a trip down memory lane for me. My grandma, my mom's mom, had do...

Tom and I set out at the crack of like 2pm with a mission to urban hike to the NY Transit Museum gift shop in FiDi (otherwise known as the Financial District). FiDi is way down at the bottom of Manhattan where there are many many tourists right about now and many many people in safety vests who work for the Statue of Liberty ferries trying to sell tickets to said tourists. While it slowed us down some, this factoid is completely irrelevant to the point of this post, so let's move on. Tom and I set out and almost immediately, I made a mental note which I subsequently announced to my hiking companion. I was totally starving because turns out, I forgot about lunch. Also it was really hot out and people were running by in spaghetti strap tops and the more I thought about a glass of water the more imperative it became to not get a heatstroke and pass out.  So we swooped into the Wintergarden and had a great lunch on the second floor in the food hall. After that, we resumed our hike beca...

  A stock photo of a family party with a similar vibe to the one I'm gonna tell you a little story about The Precursor to Why I got invited to the family Party A few years ago when my grandma was alive, I went to visit her at her house in Pennsylvania where she had ultimately wound up. Grammy grew up in the Bronx, got married there and lived in the 'hood until my dad was a teenager .  Ton of cousins and pretty much everyone else who immigrated from the "old country" lived in the Bronx at that time. As my grandma used to say, they came in on boats to Ellis Island by the truckload.   As we sat at her kitchen table, Grammy mused, "If only I could find out what happened to my cousins? If only someone (she stares at me meaningfully) knew how to work the internets?" So subtle. I took to the internets and like five minutes later, I tracked down one of the cousins. I tell my grandma the cousin is now living on the Upper West Side. Grammy replies with her eyebrows ra...

First random thing transpired while we were whipping up Hudson Street in surprising very little traffic considering the rush hour situation. Tom and I had just had a good laugh listening to Casey Newton on the Hard Fork podcast. I think Casey is so fucking funny.  Kevin Roose had been recounting that after he did a story where he tried to befriend AI Chatbots and turn them evil, the chatbots had apparently started to dislike him and give uncharitable descriptions of him, such as responding that Kevin is "unethical" when compared to most reporters. Kevin enlisted some firm to fix his AI reputation and they gave him a line of code,  he put it on his website and somewhat later, the AI Chatbots were glowing in their assessments. Casey said it kind of sounded like Kevin had bought a spell from some witches. Like a chatbot love spell. I thought it was hilarious. While I was cackling, a guy in his car comes whipping out of a side street and turns left going the wrong direction down...

  We had great seats for the baseball game. The third section up (300 level seats) were unexpectedly excellent. For his birthday, my pop wanted the whole fambo to go see a baseball game. I had more fun than I thought I was going to have, honestly. The weather was great, it was nice to see pop in his element and the whole experience was not nearly as exasperating and arduous as I had expected.  Don't get me wrong, the traffic in Philadelphia always sucks no matter when you go. But the stadium itself was very efficient and we got in and got out and the game was 2.5 hours, which is shorter than I remember. They have these countdown clocks now so the pitcher has like 30 seconds to pitch the ball and etc. No dicking around anymore is the bottomline and I'm there for it. We had decided to stay in center city and just kinda take the opportunity to spend the next day banging around downtown Philly, etc. I used to live there, afterall, and rarely go back... so everytime I do it's a ...